Many action roguelikes following the Vampire Survivors and Brotato trend place autoshoot on by default and whilst you can feel very powerful, by design its a bit of a hands off experience. This is where Cursorblade comes in. Cursorblade turns your mouse cursor into the main character and so not only do you need to move around quickly to avoid all the bullets, your initial attack requires you to move over the top of enemies to hit them. It results in a fresh perspective on a very quickly crowded genre and that allows the game to shine.
Each run is a single screen of enemies that cutely pop onto the screen for you to attack. Each enemy has a warning of their pending attack and they might bite you if you are hovering over them or fire lasers, missiles or bullets at you. The first few waves will require you to dodge in and out with your mouse to get rid of the wave of enemies but after each wave you’ll be asked to upgrade something. This will either be a new or upgraded additional attack or a passive ability and this pattern is laid out so you get a few weapon upgrades, then a passive ability.
You can have up to 6 attacks (and the game will force that upon you) which you’ll choose from the random selection and each modifies your build. Some attacks increase your range so you don’t have to move the cursor directly onto enemies anymore to attack. Some leave a trail of damage as you zip around the screen. Others drop weapons like a buzzsaw which means you don’t have to actively attack as much. Lastly there are enemy specific attacks like turning dead enemies into ghosts that attack others or when they die they explode into porcupine spikes. Nothing is outlandish or new here but with the added need to constantly move and dodge things, everything feels more alive. The passive abilities are more around health, damage and extra stat changes and some are definitely more desirable than others.
Once a run is over, you’ll convert your score into coins that unlock additional cursors. Each cursor has a second attack that you can trigger with a right click but I must be honest, they are negligible and I rarely bothered to use them. Waves go by so fast and their effect is so small, it felt like a waste of resource to use them. The other problem that Cursorblade currently has is that the game lacks an overall structure. The moment to moment gameplay is delightful, responsive, fun and frantic but you’ll have unlocked everything in a couple of hours and at the time of making the video review, there was no boss. The upgrades run out at wave 50 and then the game doesn’t really know what to do. Between the video review and the written review, the developer seems to be working to address this as they’ve added the games first boss. It doesn’t need much additional structure, but it definitely needs something and bosses and an end are great steps. Endless doesn’t feel fun as there is no leaderboard either locally or online to push yourself for more.
Overall Cursorblade is a really fun experience that just needs a bit of fleshing out. The developer is adding new things very regularly and the cute jaunty hand drawn graphics, chirpy music and tactile approach to the action roguelike genre could really be something quite special. I’d recommend it already to fans of the genre but I think it’ll be a stronger recommendation in a few months time.
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